Pages

Friday, October 7, 2011

app review: disk usage analyzer

as it was clear from my last post about torrents, i download so much. hence, end up running out of space. well, yesterday my hdd had not much space but just some hundred megabytes. it popped-up a dialog saying you're running out of space and analyze your disk.

out of curiosity (yes, i'm curious about ubuntu), i clicked on analyze. it popped-up this application named 'disk usage analyzer'. yep, it does what it stands for. it basically checks your files/directories(in ubuntu, folders are directories) for the space they take up.

the ui is again simplified. on left, it contains the directories and the size they are taking up in your hdd. on, right, it's showing the space taken by each directory as a ring chart. there's option to change ring chart from top drop-down menu and there are only two ways.

as you can see, my home directory takes up the most of space. under that, my user directory/home/aakash
is taking up the maximum space. when i select that, the internal two rings fade away (if you don't know how to read ring-chart, that's the logic, you go down, you loose inside rings).

you can compare the two pictures to understand better. what more it does is, when you hover pointer over any ring area, it gives you the next level composition directories of it. like in my case, i'm hovering mouse over/home/aakash/Music/By Artist
and it's showing the sub-directories of that.

i don't know if this app would be useful for most of us, but it's already in ubuntu. it's a small utility to check what's taking up your space. some might find it useful, some won't understand the ring chart. for those, use the left pane to understand only. no need to visualize ;)

one last thing. to refresh or re-analyze the hdd, you could click on the refresh like icon on top.